Hacktivists cut water to Irish group scheme over Israeli-made pump controller

A cyberattack on the Binghamstown and Drum group water scheme, a private community-run supply in the Erris area of County Mayo in northwest Ireland, cut off water to homes in the area for two days, on November 30 and December 1, 2023. Local reporting put the number of affected households at about 180, while The Record reported roughly 160.

The attackers took control of an internet-exposed industrial controller running the scheme's pumping system and defaced its interface with an anti-Israel message. The equipment was branded Eurotronics, a rebadged version of a product made by the Israeli manufacturer Unitronics, and the intruders said the Israeli origin of the hardware was the reason the scheme had been targeted.

The Record attributed the intrusion to Cyber Av3ngers, a pro-Iran hacktivist group that had been exploiting Unitronics programmable logic controllers left reachable from the internet and protected only by default administrative passwords. United States authorities had warned about the same campaign two days earlier, in a CISA alert of November 28, 2023 on the active exploitation of Unitronics controllers in water and wastewater systems. SecurityWeek noted that attribution remained unconfirmed.

Committee members restored the supply manually on the Friday night after spending the day bypassing the compromised controller, and acknowledged that the scheme's firewall had not been strong enough. Ireland's Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications confirmed the incident, and the National Cyber Security Centre said it had identified every vulnerable device of that type in Ireland and notified the owners. Gardai said the matter was being handled with national cybercrime units.